


Britta Can't Say That Word

by scioscribe



Category: Community
Genre: Gen, Post Season/Series 03, Stereotypes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-12
Updated: 2012-09-12
Packaged: 2017-11-14 03:02:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Okay,” Troy says, “I am not a Magical Negro.  I just happen to have special abilities that I use to heal a large number of white people and <i>oh</i>.”</p><p>“See?” Britta says.  “Fight the power, Troy!”</p><p>(Or, the one where Troy being the Truest Repairman turns out to be way more trouble than it's worth.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Britta Can't Say That Word

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for discussion of a racist trope--including discussion by Britta (although thankfully not by Pierce).

As the Truest Repairman, Troy has certain ceremonial duties, like sitting once a month on a throne where the cushions are stuffed with discarded air filters (they smell like freon and dead spiders), or fixing everyone’s psychological and spiritual problems through kindness and empathy. (Or sometimes Shirley’s cookies and a juice box. But never a Capri Sun, he only shares those with Abed.)

“Troy,” Shirley says, “you’re not getting certain ideas about being like a certain person to the point where you actually think—”

“I know I’m not Jesus,” Troy says. “Are those chocolate chip? Vince really likes chocolate chip. His wife left him, and she took all the flour. He cries whenever he goes to get more.”

The cookies are chocolate chip: Vince lives to taunt his diabetes another day. Troy knows that he’s not Jesus, only the Truest Repairman, but the people in the air conditioning repair school are a little less clear on that sometimes. He’s had to draw a few lines about what they are and aren’t allowed to worship. Then Abed said that the reason they listened to him about not worshiping him was because they _did_ worship him, and they took his announcement that they shouldn’t as a commandment, which made Troy’s brain feel like it was turning into one of Britta’s knitting projects. He said an only slightly hysterical, girly-voiced prayer about it. (He’s still a little nervous in thunderstorms. He doesn’t want to be smote. It wasn’t his idea to be the Truest Repairman!) 

Troy just tries to do what he can for the people who keep looking at him and expecting him to fix their hearts along with their connector valves.

Anyway, Jesus was a carpenter, so it’s totally different. Plumbing and air conditioning repair may be cousins—even the super close and kind of creepy kind that sleep in the same bed and have kids with see-through skin—but air conditioning repair and carpentry are, like, third cousins twice removed, and one of them lives on Mars, and they can only communicate during solar eclipses, so Troy is pretty sure that he and God are cool.

Then Britta has to ruin it.

“Troy,” she says, “what’s the ethnic makeup of the air conditioning repair school?”

“Oh boy,” Jeff says without looking up from his phone.

Troy thinks. “Mostly white, and sort of with Maybelline? I don’t know, Britta, it’s mostly guys.”

“Which is sexist—like women can’t work with their hands? Like we’re too afraid we’re going to break our nails?—but which isn’t what we’re talking about. No, I’m talking about a bunch of white people declaring that you have to save them from themselves by being _wise_ and _kind_.”

“Spike Lee,” Abed says.

“Oh,” Jeff says, putting his phone down for a second. “You mean the Magical Negro thing?”

“ _Jeff_ ,” Britta says. (Abed said once that Britta manages to hiss words that don’t have any s-sounds in them, and it’s _true_.) “You can’t say that!”

“No, _you_ can’t say that.”

“I can say it more than you! I have street cred. I’m authentic, I watched _The Wire_ and I own a _dashiki_.”

“So say the word,” Jeff says. “The term.”

“It’s a cinematic term used for analysis and cultural criticism,” Abed says.

“Magical—” Her face looks like a Slinky, but in a way where she has really pretty lips. “I can’t.”

“Okay,” Troy says, “I am not a Magical Negro. I just happen to have special abilities that I use to heal a large number of white people and _oh_.”

“See?” Britta says. “Fight the power, Troy!”

So Troy tries to fight the power, because he really doesn’t want to be sixty percent of Morgan Freeman’s movie roles, even though Annie says that Morgan Freeman is hot in an older guy kind of way. But at the same time, he doesn’t want to stop being a nice guy. He’s the Truest Repairman, and he may not be Jesus, but he still has Shirley’s WWBJD bracelet from their first Christmas. He can’t stop giving Shirley’s cookies to Vince just because Vince is white and sort of sweaty, which is _weird_ for an air conditioning repairman. Not to mention he has white friends who don’t fix air conditioners but who still sort of need fixing sometimes, like when Britta can’t stop Googling “cat diabetes” or Jeff starts sobbing at the end of _Field of Dreams_ or Annie labels their bowls by _grams of cereal they can hold_ or Pierce is Pierce—and Troy loves them and doesn’t want to throw them off into the deep end of their own (probably) coincidentally white weirdness.

The only solution is to double down on all the niceness and magical friendship he gives out to everyone else. He is the Truest Repairman, so he will just repair _everybody_ , including white people, but he will repair everybody who isn’t white _twice_.

He helps Shirley bake tiny bundt cakes with confetti sprinkles in them (they taste like all the birthdays he never had), research songs for inclusion in her church’s new hymnal, and babysits the kids that treat him like a human jungle gym and the baby that treats him like a sofa and an insufficient Shirley-substitute. Helping Shirley is cool, because she gives him lemonade and more cookies for Vince and _confetti sprinkle mini-bundt cakes_ , but then he worries that he’s accidentally helping her for food and so maybe he isn’t magical enough.

He helps Abed because he always helps Abed, but it doesn’t count for the same reason helping Shirley doesn’t count. Not that Abed gives him baked goods and pink lemonade, but that he loves Abed, and not in a neutral peace-on-earth way like the way he loves, say, the crunchy sound dead leaves make when he steps on them. He just can’t imagine a universe where he doesn’t help Abed, whether he’s magical or not, so it doesn’t count that he explains social cues to Abed, or puts money in their jar to buy another collectible _Dark Knight_ DVD, or finds Abed’s Halloween socks behind the dryer.

Dryers eat things. It is known. (They’ve been watching a lot of _Game of Thrones_ lately. Troy wants a dragon.)

He helps Sexy Dreadlocks move out of Leonard’s, and then back into Leonard’s, and then helps him fix his cable.

He helps Annie Kim make flyers for some sort of club that involves betas, like the fish that eat each other if you put them in the same bowl. Fish are weird, so Troy only wants them half as much as he wants a dragon.

He sends ex-Professor Kane an email and helps him reach closure on leaving Greendale, even though Kane says he doesn’t need closure because he’s just glad to not have to deal with Troy’s study group anymore. He probably doesn’t mean it.

He even helps Chang. Well, he finds out that Chang is living in the vents of City College and doesn’t tell anyone, which is maybe helping? Except Chang kidnapped the Dean and almost burned down the school, so—being magical is complicated.

And then he gives Vince some more cookies, tells Jeff that his father’s an asshole, gets the gum out of Britta’s hair, finds Annie’s scrunchy, pretends to understand Pierce’s reference—

And then he lets Shirley take him shopping for sweater vests for Andre, and teaches Abed how to read the clocks with the hands, and—

It’s all making him _really tired_.

“It’s hard being a minority in a media-driven culture fueled by stereotypes,” Abed says.

“I do feel increasingly less magical. And my nose kind of itches?”

“Want to go sit in the Dreamatorium? I kept it in collapsible form.”

“Is there room for both of us?” He doesn’t want to be alone right now.

“It’s kind of a single stall. I’m working on expansion, but since we can’t use a whole room anymore, it’s tricky. We may have to utilize a fourth dimension.”

Troy likes it when Abed talks about science. It makes him feel like he’s finally understanding everything he wasn’t even listening to in high school, and then he gets shivery because he would have been stupid about knowing Abed when he was in high school. He would have missed him, just like he missed Annie. He grabs Abed’s hand.

“When I do stuff for you,” he says, “it’s never because I’m magical.”

“I know,” Abed says. “It’s because we’re friends and you’re a good person. Which is why you’re helping people. Britta worries a lot about how she’s supposed to be, so she forgets how she is, and starts trying to live up to standards that don’t exist for anyone. But being magical doesn’t make you a Magical Negro. It just makes you Troy. Help the people that you want to help and just make sure you help yourself and that people help you back sometimes. The Truest Repairman repairs other people and the system, but he doesn’t forget to repair himself. I’m assuming, I mean, it’s a made-up archetype.”

“I also fix air conditioners.”

“Presumably.”

“You made a speech for me,” Troy says. He’s misting up a little. Abed is worth a _billion dragons_. He puts his feet up on the footstool that’s actually a pile of Annie’s binders and decides that he, as the Truest Repairman, is going to help himself to a movie. “Can we watch _The Emperor’s New Groove_?”

“Okay,” Abed says, “but only twice.”


End file.
